Daily Search Forum Recap: September 15, 2009

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

Goog_e's Missing "L" Crop Circles UFO Logo
In continuation of Google's missing "O" unexplained phenomenon logo, we now have a logo missing an "L" and linking to a crop circles search result. This Google logo has the file name goog_e.gif and looks like this: The one ten days ago, the missing O, looked like this: This time, Google tweeted the coordinates "51.327629, -0.5616088" which is in Woking, Surrey GU21 4, UK. Is Google spelling something? What is going on here? Forum discussion

Poll: How Secure Are Your Search Engine Positions?
There is an excellent thread at WebmasterWorld on the topic of search engine position security. In short, the SEO is asking others, how secure do you feel that your rankings won't change all that much? How secure do you feel in your site's success in Google? How secure do you feel that Google won't change things up so drastically that your site won't be impacted? Why should you feel nervous? Some of the points in

Video Demo of Bing's New Visual Search
All that chatter of Bing 2.0 I guess was about Microsoft launching a new search feature to let you narrow your search results down through filters and images - i.e. visually. Here is a video demo of how it works: As you can see, for the most part, this is structured data and doesn't appear to be data from unstructured parts of the web. In any event, this is a really nice and easy way

Video Demo of Google News Fast Flip
Last night, Google announced a really neat feature for Google News in the Google Labs named Fast Flip. It basically lets you visually flip through Google News, as you would in a magazine, on the screen. The best way to explain this is a quick demo: There is also a mobile version for iPhones and Android devices. Here is the FAQs and there are about 40 current news sources included. Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

Google Suggests Searchers Should "Kill Yourself" & Commit Suicide
A Google Web Search Help thread has a complaint from a worried searcher who stumbled upon a Google Suggestion on how to kill yourself. He said he was searching for tips on killing poisonous mushrooms and when he began typing "how to kill," Google suggested he search for "How to killing yourself." Here is a picture: Google does sometimes censor the suggestions in the list but typically they are algorithmically driven based on searcher popularity.

Google Blamed For New York Times Malware
On Saturday/Sunday, the New York Times ran an ad that contained malware. In fact, the New York Times manned up to it in an article named Times Web Ads Show Security Breach. In short, a rogue advertiser posed as Vonage and displayed ads that appeared to be from Vonage. But what really was in those ads were lines of malicious code that filled user's screens "with an image that seemed to show a scan for